Some time ago, we noticed some security researchers looking for critical vulnerabilities affecting “security” based products (such as antivirus) that can have a damaging impact to enterprise and desktop users. Take a stroll through the Google Project Zero bug tracker to see what we mean.
A few months ago, we decided to make a new module for our Advanced Windows Exploitation class. After evaluating a few options we chose to work with an Adobe Flash 1day vulnerability originally discovered by the Google Project Zero team. Since we did not have any previous experience with Flash internals, we expected a pretty steep learning curve.
Last week Microsoft released EMET 5.1 to address some compatibility issues and strengthen mitigations to make them more resilient to attacks and bypasses. We, of course, were curious to see if our EMET 5.0 disarming technique has been addressed by the latest version of the toolkit.
In our previous Disarming Emet 4.x blog post, we demonstrated how to disarm the ROP mitigations introduced in EMET 4.x by abusing a global variable in the .data section located at a static offset. A general overview of the EMET 5 technical preview has been recently published here.
In a recent engagement, we had the opportunity to audit a leading Antivirus Endpoint Protection solution, where we found a multitude of vulnerabilities. Some of these made it to CERT, while others have been scheduled for review during our upcoming AWE course at Black Hat 2014, Las Vegas. Ironically, the same software that was meant to protect the organization under review was the reason for its compromise.
With the emergence of recent Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities, we’ve been seeing a trend of EMET recommendations as a path to increasing application security. A layered defense is always helpful as it increases the obstacles in the path of an attacker. However, we were wondering how much does it really benefit? How much harder does an attacker have to work to bypass these additional protections? With that in mind, we started a deep dive into EMET.
In the past few days there has been some online chatter about a new Windows XP/2k3 privilege escalation, well documented by FireEye. Googling around, we came across a Twitter message which contained a link to a Chinese vulnerability analysis and PoC.
In one of our recent pentests, we discovered an 0day for a custom C application server running on the AIX Operating System. After debugging the crash, we discovered that the bug could lead to remote code execution and since we don’t deal very often with AIX exploitation, we decided to write an exploit for it. The first steps were accomplished pretty quickly and we successfully diverted the execution flow by jumping to a controlled buffer. At this point, we thought we could easily generate some shellcode from MSF and enjoy our remote shell.
On a recent penetration test, we encountered an installation of CA ARCserve Backup on one of the target systems that piqued our interest. Like most “good” enterprise applications, ARCserve has processes that are running as SYSTEM so naturally, we went straight to work looking for vulnerabilities.
During a routine scan of new vulnerability reports for the Exploit Database, we came across a single post in full disclosure by Martin Tschirsich, about a Remote Code Execution vulnerability in FreePBX. This vulnerability sounded intriguing, and as usual, required verification in the EDB. At first glance, the vulnerability didn’t…
Every patch Tuesday, we, like many in the security industry, love to analyze the released patches and see if any of them can lead to the development of a working exploit. Recently, the MS11-080 advisory caught our attention as it afforded us the opportunity to play in the kernel and try to get a working privilege escalation exploit out of it.
Our Advanced Windows Exploitation (AWE) live course in Columbia, Maryland is fast approaching with a start-date of October 24. Not only is the first time we have offered this training outside of BlackHat, it is also the first time we are able to offer a full 5 days of training and a limited number of seats are still available for this intense course.
The guys at the Exploit Database posted an awesome writeup on a Winamp 5.58 Exploit Development storming session – with some really cool results. In the end, they ended up writing a short assembly sequence to walk through the payload and replace bad characters with original shellcode bytes. Read more – Winamp 5.58 from Dos to Code Execution
It’s not often we wake up and find a massive 0day submitted to the Exploit Database – but today was different. Abysssec security released an Adobe Shockwave player 0day. We verified the exploit as part as our verification process in the Exploit database and made a short movie to demonstrate the the vulnerability.
This guide comes from my own journey from finding a buffer overflow in an OS X application to producing a working exploit. I have reasonably good exploit development skills having completed the Penetration Testing with BackTrack and Cracking the Perimeter training courses, and working on several buffer overflow exploits. The majority of my exploit development skills are based around Windows vulnerabilities and using the OllyDBG debugger.
